Writing a Jewish Life: Memoirs
by Lev Raphael
Carroll & Graf. 192 pages, $14.95
Secret Anniversaries of the Heart: New and Selected Stories
by Lev Raphael
Leapfrog Press. 248 pages, $15.95
LEV RAPHAEL was one of the first writers to contemplate the intersection of being openly gay and being openly Jewish, and has now published two new books on the topic. For those not familiar with his short story collection of 1990, Dancing on Tisha b’Av (whose title was a play on the concept of fasting on holy day), Secret Anniversaries of the Heart is a wonderful introduction to this writer’s world. About ten of the 25 stories are reprinted from Dancing on Tisha b’Av.
Most of the stories are set in the not-too-distant past, either in crowded Jewish New York apartments or in dorms in Midwest universities, and many are informed by popular music from a few decades ago, notably that of David Bowie. Bowie’s repudiation of his putative bisexuality, at the same time as the death of a long-ago lover from AIDS, cuts the narrator of “Betrayed by David Bowie” to the quick. “Gimme Shelter,” a new story for this collection, centers around two men who attend a women’s service at a synagogue during a national gay and lesbian conference in San Francisco; at one point they’re fairly swallowed up by a giant prayer shawl bearing the colors of the rainbow flag. In the title story, a gay man tries to deal with the homophobia and anti-Semitism of a writing instructor. Raphael’s writing is greatly influenced by the condition of being a “One Generation After” Jew. These are the children of Jews who were concentration camp survivors, or who managed to spend the Holocaust years in hiding in perilous circumstances. These are the children who, if they inadvertently purchased something made in West Germany, would have to return it; who, if they crayoned the “S” in a picture of Superman’s costume too exuberantly, would hear a parent recoil in horror at the its resemblance to the lettering on a storm trooper’s uniform. In Raphael’s stories, it’s always easy to see which character will be the “gay son,” but it’s anyone’s guess as to how—or even if—this character will come out to a parent who survived the Nazis but regard having a gay son as a tragedy and a shandeh or shameful thing. Writing a Jewish Life, a loosely connected collection of essays, is a little more focused on the Jewish aspects of the author’s life. Raphael writes movingly of building a life with his lover Gersh and Gersh’s young sons, of being an academic, and of going on book tours. One particularly fascinating section described his view of the very first “gay section” of a bookstore in Israel. On other tours, he’s sometimes asked to “put aside” being gay, as if it were not as much a part of his identity as being Jewish. The problem of “coming out” as a Jew—and even that of coming out as a gay person—may seem slightly antiquated in the 21st century, but Raphael shows that they continue to resonate as issues that we never quite resolve. Raphael is a seasoned writer whose prose is captivating enough to sweep the reader through both of these volumes with pleasure.
